Subject: duplicate relation (was Re: Last Call: draft-nottingham-http-link-header (Web Linking) to Proposed Standard)

From: Sam Johnston <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:21:11 +0200

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 7:38 AM, Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]> wrote:

>
> People will want to do different things with relations like "prev," "index"
> and "alternate"; not all link relations are purely functional (indeed, most
> should not be) and there will be unintended reuse of them for things we
> can't foresee.
>
> Take, for example, the "duplicate" relation type currently being discussed;
> while it's immediately useful for MetaLink, there are many other potential
> uses for it, and the client behaviour with each is potentially different.
>

With regard to the "duplicate" relation specifically, it is currently
defined <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bryan-metalinkhttp-04#section-8>as:

Refers to a resource whose available representations are byte-for-byte
> identical with the corresponding representations of the context IRI.

I'm glad I checked because my first reading of duplicate was in the verb "to
copy" and as such I would very much prefer an unambiguous term like
"replica" be used. "mirror" is another option but it too could be construed
as a verb (e.g. in the context of CDN management).

Sam